


On the Evolution of Definitions

by Amarantramentum



Category: League of Legends
Genre: Character Study, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-14
Updated: 2019-03-14
Packaged: 2019-11-17 23:47:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18108977
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amarantramentum/pseuds/Amarantramentum
Summary: He always despised the colour crimson. And yet even definitions were apt to change.





	On the Evolution of Definitions

Crimson.

What a terrible colour. To even taste the word upon his tongue felt a betrayal of all he stood for. Beneath the weight of the word – a mere seven letters in length – it felt as if armies were felled and injustice prevailed. It felt the way chains sounded, scraping along the dusty earth beneath and rattling against metal bars at night. It sounded like that wordless scream he once heard howled to the moon by a man driven mad by incomprehensible things.

How terrible. How pitiful.

Crimson was _their_ colour. Jarvan had seen it smeared carelessly upon otherwise grey battlefields on scattered banners and lives smeared across rock as if they never mattered at all. It was the blood-chilling call of a war horn, rallying numbers beyond comprehension to death. It was the rend of a sword tearing away armour and flesh alike, caring not whether it left life or death beyond, so long as the enemy was incapacitated. So long as he screamed.

It was _Noxus_.

Crimson stained all that they did; dyed their hands with the sins of their slaughter until one day, they themselves drowned in it. He remembered dreams where he held pulses in tight hands and grinned as lifeless eyes stared back at him. Dreams where he, himself, tasted the slaughter _and did not care at all_. If every life was a gift from the gods, then he would happily become the demon – the _wolf_ – who tore their very throats from their necks with his teeth and their hearts from their chests with his claws until all that was left was _viscera_.

Until all that remained was a single smear easily rinsed away with rain.

Jarvan remembered fever delirium breaking so he awoke in a cold sweat but _laughing_ because it all had felt so real, yet when he looked down at his hands there was no crimson staining them. There was nothing at all but the blackness of dirt and the steel-grey chains. A reminder he never would be free again.

He never would taste revenge upon his lips and hear their screams disappear into the night sky.

No, it was not his hands they stained crimson, but the skin of his back. They were not the ones who screamed it aloud – a elegy for all the souls departed and a hymn for the crimson they left behind. They were torn from his throat, raw as he wished he now could _skin_ them. If an eye for an eye made the whole world blind, then he happily would wander the world unable to see again if it meant he had avenged his people.

It mattered not that he had fallen to their dark depths, Jarvan thought, as he bade himself not to cry.

His body felt then as if he, himself, was immolated to that endless slaughter and unable to escape his fate. His body cast aflame yet there was nothing that could save him. What a comedy it must be to the gods, to see that pure-white prince clad in his armour of light be slaughtered upon an altar of his people’s bodies.

Sometimes, Jarvan wondered if the gods were happy to watch the world turn crimson.

When he entered the gates and saw what laid beyond, only more crimson greeted him. Perhaps he never would be clean of it ever again – that terrible, heavy scent of blood never washing from his skin, for he, too, had become dyed as they were. What a terrible fate indeed for the prince who once sneered upon them from his castle of white stone.

But the irony of fate always had been a popular topic of art, and now he knew why.

Hands he flinched from offered all that he might have needed, and he, clinging onto all the hope he had left, allowed them to do as they wished. Yet they were gentle when he would have allowed anything to survive. Yet he was clothed and fed and treated always as an equal – young, perhaps, and more naïve than one might expect of someone his age, yet always, an equal.

How odd it was, the feeling of giving in to a kindness that felt as sweet as it did poison. Yet as the days passed, somehow, the bars which kept him locked away from sight did not feel so frightening after all, and there were times where he found himself worrying not for the state of his people, but for the man who once had sighed wistfully as he recounted art galleries in faraway lands and how he wished to visit with him in tow.

How odd it was indeed, to find pieces of himself in a Noxian dyed crimson as they all were. To learn that someone whose hands surely were not free of sin could hope for something he, too, prayed the gods would give him strength to accomplish. To find shattered pieces of a man whose hopes were quietly crushed, for the gods were never so kind, and wish with all his heart to find every piece and put them together even if his hands bled from the endeavour.

It was slowly that Jarvan learnt love, too, was a crimson shade. Oh, what a cruel trick it was of the gods to play upon his young heart, for he never wished to see beauty in the colour at all. Always, it had been hatred and anger and death and blood and all the terrible things in the world. And yet as he looked upon the future, it felt as if perhaps his mistakes never mattered at all. The crimson stains upon his soul were not so dark – were not so heavy a burden to carry – if it meant that together, they could forge a new dawn.

As the sun broke a new day upon dark spires, it stained the sky with streaks of crimson. And perhaps that, too, was not so bad a thing after all.  


End file.
